White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is being asked about a report that President Joe Biden pressed Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani to “project a different picture” about the Taliban’s advances before Afghan security forces collapsed.
During a press briefing on Wednesday, Psaki was asked, “Was the president in any way pushing a false narrative in that call?”
“I am not going to go into the details of a private conversation,” Psaki began. “But what we saw over the course of the last few months was a collapse of in leadership. And that was happening even before Ghani left the country.”
She continued, “What the president has conveyed repeatedly privately and publicly is you need to stand up and lead your country, and that’s something he said in a press conference in July in public form.”
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REPORTER: "Was the president in any way pushing a false narrative in that call?"
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 1, 2021
PSAKI: "I am not going to go into the details of a private conversation…" pic.twitter.com/4lJPX6QXT6
The question comes after Reuters reported details of a phone call between Ghani and Biden that took place on July 23, weeks before the Taliban took over the country and the Afghan president fled.
According to the transcript, Biden praised the Afghan security forces as he said, “You clearly have the best military.”
“You have 300,000 well-armed forces versus 70-80,000, and they’re clearly capable of fighting well,” he added.
However, Reuters said the president focused on a “perception” issue related to the Afghan government.
“I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” he told Ghani. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
The details of the phone call reported by Reuters come weeks after the Taliban stunned U.S. officials with the speed in which it took over Afghanistan.
Shortly after the takeover, Biden admitted that “this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”
“So, what’s happened? Afghan political leaders gave up and left the country. The Afghan military collapsed…If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision. American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” he added.
